I came home to cherry blossoms on Monday.I was overly optimistic in the purchase of a cherry pitter last year, but perhaps this is the year. Cherry trees have a bad reputation in New England. They’re more susceptible than other fruit trees to frost, disease, and bugs. They’re also taller than all the other fruit trees, making them almost impossible to pick outside of a commercial enterprise. A bad combination.

But they sound so good! Cherry blossoms! Fresh cherries! No, resist the urge. There are viable alternatives. I recommend ground cherries, cornelian cherries, and the object of this post, the bush cherry, also called Nanking Cherry. All of these cherry alternatives are a lot easier to grow and to pick. I was first introduced to Nanking Cherries by Lee Reich in his awesome book, Landscaping with Fruit. I checked it out of the library enough times that I finally just went out and bought it. I fact, I reviewed it in this post last year.

According to Lee, unlike a traditional cherry tree, the bush cherry is both cold and heat hearty, with no major disease or creepy crawly concerns. Some plants produce fruit over a long season, which is best for fresh eating. Some plants produce all of their fruit at once, which is best for cooking/preserving. The bush cherry will supposedly do the latter putting out one batch of cherry blossoms in the spring and one batch of fresh cherries in the summer. I have images in my head of a freezer full of cherries, which get added all year long to smoothies, pies, and cordials.

I bought 12 Nanking Cherries for $24 two seasons ago. Two didn’t make it, but at $2/bush, I wasn’t too fussed about it. The other 10 spent all of last year as scrubby little bushes with a few leaves. They are said to fruit in their 2nd or 3rd year, so I thought there was a chance for fruit. Hence my wasted purchase of a cherry pitter the preceding winter. But this year, with several of them in bloom, I see hope!

What I don’t see are bees. Is it just me or do many of the hardier plants flower before the bees come out for the season? What do you do about that? I really need to get hives… But in the meantime, I took a q-tip and went flower to flower, hoping I could simulate pollination. I also q-tipped the cornelian cherry and the peaches while I was at it.

I don’t suppose I’ll know the results for a while. Updates to follow in about 3 months 🙂

It isn’t really all that arcane. Nor is it much of a science. You need four relatively simple ingredients: fruit, sugar, pectin, and lemon juice. You mix them together in a pot and voila, you have one of the tastiest and most useful ways of saving fruit. I wrote in a prior post that my favorite way to preserve the summer’s bounty of fruit is in rum, but jam is at least #2 on the list.

It’s true that the recipe consists of more than saying, ‘voila,’ but not really by all that much. Because it’s really not a science. As I said before, you put it in a pot. Eventually, after you’ve cooked it for a while, it thickens into jam. The art (for I won’t call it science again) is only in recognizing the point where your glop ceases to be glop and becomes instead jam.

Here’s how it works. You take a fruit, any fruit, and you remove any part you don’t want to eat. You put the rest in the pot. Let’s take an apple, for example: If you don’t want a giant apple skin in your jam, peel the apple. If you like little bits of apple skin in your jam, cut your apple skin into little bits. If you want big chunks of apple in your jam, use big chunks of apple. If you want something smoother, put it through a food processor. What I’m saying is, you can put almost anything you want into jam, as long as it’s edible, and what you put in is what you’re going to get out.

So you’ve put those chunks of apple into a pot and turned on the fire. If you cook it long enough, the water will begin to cook out, the flavors will start to concentrate, and your fruit will thicken first into syrup and eventually into jam. Everything else is window dressing.

Most people add lots of sugar. It thickens your fruit mixture, reducing the cooking time to jam. It also makes it sweeter, which may be totally unnecessary. Fruit it already pretty sweet. Fruit that has been cooked has sweetened further as the flavors have concentrated.

Pectin is just another thickening agent. Ergo, it is unnecessary but useful. As I’ve already said, if you cook fruit long enough, it becomes jam on its own. Sugar and pectin just speed up the process. I use the Sure Jell Pectin brand single serving boxes available in any grocery or hardware store. I’ve tried some other varieties that looked more cost effective, but they didn’t work very well. I use the low sugar variety of pectin. This doesn’t mean that your pectin has less sugar in it. Low sugar pectin means that your jam will need less sugar in order to solidify into jam. This means you get more fruit flavor and less pure sweet. A worthy trade-off to my mind.

So are you with me so far? Put cut-up fruit into a pot. Cook (stirring regularly) until it boils. Add sugar and pectin. Keep cooking until it comes to a boil again.

Last ingredient – lemon juice. The big fear with canning at home is that you’ll get mold or something into your jam. Mold doesn’t like acid. Lemon juice is very acidic. Adding a quarter cup or more drops the PH of your jam enough that stuff won’t grow in it.

But this is too vague! How much of each thing to I add?! Ok, here’s a template:

4 cups fruit (chopped)

2 cups sugar

1 box low-sugar pectin

1/4 cup lemon juice

The stuff they sell by the bottle is fine.

Basically, cook the fruit until it reaches a slow boil. Add the sugar and cook until it reaches a slow boil. Add the pectin and continue to cook the potion until it thickens. Stir in the lemon juice. You’ve got jam.

I sometimes struggle to tell when it’s thickened enough. It will thicken as it cools down, but by how much? It’s still hot when you’re making the decision. One solution is to scoop some out with a spoon and set it aside. Once it cools down in a minute or two, it will be obvious whether or not cooling is sufficient enough to thicken it.

This will keep in your fridge for a couple of weeks in a Tupperware without any problem. Honestly, I’ve kept it in my fridge most of a year and never had any problems with it. If you would like it to keep longer, time to try canning.

I’ll write a post about that later.

Spoiler alert. Canning means storing in jars. It has nothing at all to do with cans. Go figure.

Having finished the Fire Cider I bought while camping a couple of weeks ago, it’s time to make my own. I have the list of ingredients from the back of the bottle:

but I turned to Google to find a recipe.

I wonder what people did before Google? Googling Fire Cider gets a lot of hits. There’s a name brand that dominates the headlines, but adding ‘recipe’ to the search got me a number of new hits from various health food blogs. I decided to try this one from Mommypotamus.

The gist of it is that you put everything but the vinegar and honey into a quart mason jar. Then fill up the jar with the apple cider vinegar. Seal it, let it steep in a dark place for a month, then strain it. I like to use a big colander lined with cheese cloth with a bowl underneath to strain stuff like this. Once you have the doctored cider, add warm honey until you’re happy with the taste. Do as you like with the veggies. I may have to work myself up to trying vinegar infused raw horseradish. I gather that some people stir fry them, so that might be good.

Ingredients

Where do I find raw horseradish, ginger, and turmeric in March? I checked Market Basket and Whole Foods. Surprisingly, both had all three, although Whole Foods was 3X the price. Each of these flavorful roots comes in sizes far larger than that needed for this recipe. I spent a couple of hours washing, peeling, and chopping until my wrists hurt. Surprise – tumeric apparently stains everything yellow!

After pulling out the ½ cup of each I needed for the recipe, I ended up with a couple of diced cups of each root to keep in freezer bags until I make the recipe again. I used the fresh stuff for this recipe, but froze the rest, since there seemed little chance that what remained would keep until the next time.

Finding jalapenos were even less of a problem. There was a big bin with all sizes at the store. Having learned the hard way, I put on latex gloves before attacking the hot peppers. I was wary of the spice potential with this recipe, so I pulled out about ¾ of the seeds before dumping everything else into the mason jar. I know, I know. It’s called Fire Cider. I should have left them in.

Raw apple cider vinegar is somewhat harder to come by, at least on a budget. Market Basket sells a gallon of their apple cider vinegar for $2.69. Nothing on the label implies that it’s live culture. Right next to it on the shelf, selling for about $20/gallon is Bragg’s.

Much better stuff, but almost 10x the price. Hard to justify the price on a recipe I haven’t tried yet. I really wanted live culture though, so I bit the bullet and picked this up too.

When I had added all the dry ingredients to the mason jar, a quart seemed too small. I transferred it all over to a half gallon jar, then added the cider. Looking good!

I decided that it was safe to increase the vinegar to spices ratio. It’s going to steep for weeks. I can just let it steep longer to make sure I get enough flavor in there.

Preservation (keeping out the mold!)

Since this recipe is vinegar based, the acidity should prevent mold from growing. However, there’s a chance of mold on anything sticking out above the layer of vinegar. This is a common problem with any fermenting project, like making sauerkraut. People have found various solutions. I’ve been shaking mine every day so that the vinegar recoats everything. Another trick is to put a plastic bag with some vinegar in the top of the jar. This would press the veggies down into the solution. If it leaks, you’re just adding some vinegar to your vinegar, so little harm done. However, I’ve tried to steer clear of this one, since I’m not sure what chemicals might come off the plastic under the month long influence of vinegar. I read somewhere that you can also just shove a cabbage leaf into the top of the jar. I like the sound of that but honestly, I don’t often have a cabbage leaf lying around.

Apple Cider Vinegar

The author of the recipe above describes it as a cold and flu remedy, as opposed to a preventative, but either way, it sounds pretty good. Ok, it sounds kind of awful… horseradish and ginger steeped in apple cider vinegar? But having nerved myself up enough the first time to try it, it really was amazing. A good, live culture apple cider vinegar is supposed to have its own amazing health benefits. Add in all these natural preventatives and I could just feel myself getting healthier as it went down. In the field of placebos, this one was a winner.

But really, why shouldn’t it be good for you? Lots of natural foods are good for you. I figure I’ll put them all together into a power shot and enjoy the unverifiable benefits. There’s a reason people have been drinking vinegar for thousands of years. The acetic acid inhibits bacterial growth, the antioxidants in it reduce cholesterol, and daily consumption of apple cider vinegar has been shown to correlate to lower blood sugar and weight loss. Studies of apple cider vinegar on rat populations have even shown a reduced cancer risk.

Free Fire Cider

That said, it turns out that an Old New England herbal remedy, Fire Cider is not. While it has antecedents that stretch back to Roman times, the modern iteration of Fire Cider was apparently invented in the early 80s by Rosemary Gladstar at the California School of Herbal Studies. There are several well known tonics based on apple cider vinegar, but they are generally pretty mild. Fire Cider is unique, with what Rosemary described as a “well balanced blend of hot, spicy, and pungent flavors steeped in apple cider vinegar and finished with the rich sweetness of honey… The original formula contained garlic, onions, horseradish root, ginger root, hot peppers, sometimes turmeric, and often echinacea; all powerful immune enhancers that help ward off infections, colds, flus, and bronchial congestion. We found we could use Fire Cider during the winter, a tablespoon or two a day, to help keep the immune system healthy and to ward off infections. All this, and it tasted good too!”

According to Rosemary’s website, Free Fire Cider, she’s been teaching people to make Fire Cider for decades and it’s become a common herbal remedy in the holistic community, made at home and sold in shops across the country. Recently, a company called Shire City Herbals trademarked Fire Cider for itself. It’s since been suing anyone else selling Fire Cider. Seems a bit harsh. I gather that there’s a an ongoing legal battle to ‘free fire cider.’ Assuming this recipe comes out drinkable, I think I’ll make my own going forward 🙂

Having made it. All that’s left is to try it. Truth is, I’m a little nervous. Wish me luck!

I was camping (cabining?) in Western MA a few years ago and took a day trip out to this amazing little café/co-op/bakery place we had stumbled on. This was one of our rare camping trips where it wasn’t raining. That’s the advantage of a January trip, after all. We got snow instead. So we were just killing time and trying to stay warm. We got to talking with the clerk, who had a display on her counter of something called Fire Cider. It looked rather like a ketchup dispenser at a football game, with a big pump and a little exit spout.

For $.75 you could get a shot of Fire Cider. But what is Fire Cider? Apparently it’s an apple cider vinegar based health tonic. The Huffington Post had a great description for it. “Fire Cider is one of those grandma-style cold and hangover remedies that is designed to be one part soothing, one part refreshing, and one part BURNING-IT-OUT-OF-YOU!”

It’s an apt description. I ponied up my $.75 and got a shot of it. With my wife and the clerk laughing at me, I knocked it back. It certainly woke me up. It was kind of sweet, kind of tangy, and kind of fiery. It made my nose run and my eyes pop out…but not in a bad way. In fact, I rather liked it.

Then I gave it no more thought for a while. Except…it kept coming back to mind. I couldn’t even remember the name. I wanted to call up this cute bakery in Western, MA (whose name I also couldn’t remember) and try to describe it to them. “Hey, I was there a few years ago. You convinced me to drink this weirdly refreshing thing. Umm..no, I don’t know what it was called. Err…no, I don’t know what it was made it of. Well…it kind of looked like a ketchup dispenser, but not. So, yeah, do you still carry it?” I gave up, but the thought nagged at me.

Fire years later… the kids are old enough for a stay in those winter cabins. And, so, earlier this month, we were finally back in Western MA.

You can bet the first thing I did in preparation was google around to figure out the what that amazing cafe/co-op/bakery place was. It took a little while to find, but turned out that it was the Old Creamery Co-op in Cummington, MA. Worth a visit, by the way.

No snow on this trip. With temperatures fluctuating wildly between -5 to 10 degrees, it was too cold to snow. In fact, it was too cold to do much of anything, other than snuggle up to the wood stove. You can see by the melted mitten here that I had an Icarus moment and snuggled a little too close to the sun (err…woodstove).

Although they bore up well, that kind of cold is tough on the little kids. By day 3, a field trip to a bakery was definitely in order. Preferably one with hot cocoa. When we went in, I dumped the kids at a table up front and wandered around. To my disappointment, I didn’t immediately see any weird drink dispenser by the counter. Not giving up, I paced the aisles and found a display in the back corner of the store. Apparently it was called Fire Cider, and they sold it by the bottle.

I also took a picture of the ingredient list. They said it was an old New England herbal remedy. Maybe I could try making it at home.

You can’t really make it out in this picture, but the ingredients are basically apple cider vinegar, horseradish, ginger, tumeric, onion, garlic, lemon, orange, hot peppers, and honey. Fire cider indeed! They gave me a sample from the dispenser. Talk about a drink designed to clear out your sinuses. After three days of camping with the woodstove running 24/7, there was a lot to clear out.

I bought about a cup of the potion and brought it home. I’ve been taking roughly a table spoon of it every morning as a pick me up. And pick me up it does. Here’s to home herbal recipes!

Alas, after two weeks, I’m running out. Time to try making my own. (see part 2)

Well, it’s January and the 2017 planting season has begun. I say this every year, but this is my favorite time of year in the garden. Well, not so much in the garden as in my imagination. This is the planning season, where we read through the catalogs, research the local heirloom options, and imagine a warm summer day where we’re picking our own apples, pears, raspberries, etc.

And perhaps what we grow in our imaginations is better than what we actually manage to grow on our tiny farm. For instance, when I’m thinking about the great Kale we’ll grow, I’m thinking about freezing it and dropping it into smoothies, rather than about the cabbage moths and their accompanying caterpillars who will inevitably leave the leaves looking like someone went at them with a hole punch. Bit of a downer really.

So I enjoy this moment of potential now. There are any number of new perennials we’d like to add. We’ll go with some and skip some others. I’d really like to try wintergreen for instance. We all know the flavor from the gum, I suppose. But the plant itself is useful. It’s an evergreen ground-cover whose leaves and bright red berries taste like mint. The berries stay bright and cheerful into the winter. The plant makes good tea and the leaves have medicinal value.

On the other hand, the nursery from which I had planned to buy the wintergreen doubled their price between last year and this. So maybe this won’t be the year. After all, if we bought everything this year, what would we do next winter when we’re trying to stave off the cold and the dark?

But we’ve already invested in a few newbies as well. Lingonberry, for instance. This is a low-slung winter hardy tart fruit out of Scandinavia. You can bet it won’t be bothered by our balmy New England winters. This cranberry like fruit is traditionally made into jams, cordials, and wine.

What else are we going to try? We’ll debate it all winter. We’ve been ogling the chocolate berry (Himalayan Honeysuckle) in Raintree Nursery’s catalog for several winters now. Maybe this is the year.

It likes a slightly warmer zone than ours, but that’s what south facing walls are for, right?

Do you have something you’re dying to try out this year? Let us know in the comments.

We’ve become increasingly entertained by cordials. They go down easy and taste pretty good, after all. But even more than that, they’re fun to make and they make great gifts. We’ve made a pear vodka several times. It goes great in ginger ale, but is smooth and sweet enough to enjoy straight, even if you’re not normally a fan of the hard stuff.

Definition time. A cordial is a liqueur, a strong sweet alcoholic liquor. These, in turn, are all infusions. An infusion is the process by which a pre-existing alcohol absorbs an external flavor. If you buy a vanilla latte at the coffee shop, they are squirting vanilla flavored syrup into a cup with espresso and milk. That’s an infusion of sorts (minus the alcohol). And the same is basically true for these fun flavored vodkas you see at the store.

What we make at home involves a slightly different process.

The pear infusions we made were immensely complicated, requiring us to harvest slightly overripe globes of amber fruit with a silver sickle by the light of a full moon. I personally recommend harvesting during the Sturgeon Moon. These perfect parcels were then simmered over a fire of mistletoe branches and stirred with a spoon carved from a rowan branch.

Or maybe we just bought the pears off of Market Basket’s discount rack? Yeah, that was it. We let them ripen on the counter, then chopped them up (minus the core). They went into a pot with some sugar, some cinnamon sticks, two vanilla beans, and a cheesecloth bag containing whole cloves and allspice. When you simmer pear, it breaks down pretty quickly into a viscous pear syrup. We poured this into a large glass jar, spices and all.

The next part was tricky, we had to infuse this pear syrup into the vodka. We did so by pouring a 1.5 liter bottle of vodka into the glass jar with the pear and letting it sit for a week or so. We stirred it once/day by moving the jar in circles. I suppose there’s a technical name for that, but I don’t know it. The only other thing to note was that we kept it out of the sun.

The vodka, fruit, and sugar all mixed together. After a week or two, we poured the potion through a colander lined with cheese cloth to remove the cinnamon sticks, vanilla beans, and larger fruit particles. The amber concoction then goes into pretty jars for gifts. Most of it anyway.

If you noticed that I haven’t included specific measurements in this recipe, it’s because they don’t really matter. Fruit goes in pot. Add sugar and flavoring until you like the taste. Cook until the fruit breaks down. Add alcohol. Age. Done.

What alcohol should I use? Whatever you want. What fruit? What’s your favorite? Obviously, some flavors might go better together than others, but that’s really at the maker’s discretion. The recipe will work regardless. Vodka’s easy, since it doesn’t really have its own flavor. Whatever fruit and spices you use will be what it tastes like. Rum too is pretty easy going, although people have historically gone tropical with their rum infusions. Spiced or coconut rum are pretty well known, but the stores are now lined now with pineapple, mango, and apple varieties. Brandy is a smooth, warm alcohol, which makes me want to mix it with dark fruit, like cherries, cranberries, or blueberries.

When I was a junior in high school, my American Lit teacher taught us all that the Robert Frost poem, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, was about a man contemplating suicide. Why else would a man be stalling in the snow, on the ‘darkest evening of the year.’

That didn’t resonate with me at the time. Nor does it now. But the older I get, the more the lines themselves speak to me. Maybe because it feels like a growing up poem.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

The woods are lovely, but it just doesn’t matter. Because I have promises to keep. And these duties will stretch for miles and miles, all of which must be traversed before I can finally crawl into bed. And do it all again the next day. And the next. And the next. And there is no out, because people are depending on me.

As a young parent, that’s what it feels like anyway. And it’s what I see in the young parents around me. As a kid, you looked at the older generations and wondered why they were so bitter. Where did all the joy go? I think I understand that now. And I think Frost felt it, as he once stood in the woods on a snowy evening. There is a peace in the woods, in the snow. There’s a sense that all the demands on you can be put aside for a while.

But they can’t. Your responsibilities loom over your shoulder, because that’s what being an adult means. You know that all the things you have to do will only be done by you. And they must be done. You have to go to work every day to pay the mortgage. No one else is going to do it for you. The kids must be entertained, fed, changed, bathed, put to bed.

I have a good life, no harder than anyone else’s. But I read this poem and I long for a peace that I pretend existed before kids, before spouse, house, and 9-5.

And I wonder if that peace is in my future. When the kids are older and not clinging to every step we take, will it all seem easier? When we’ve scrimped and saved enough pennies to exit the 9-5 grind, will we remember what it once was to be joyous and carefree?

I write a lot about frugality in this blog, but it’s a means to an end, not the end itself. We are careful with money now, anticipating that this lifestyle buys us and our kids a better existence down the line. I hope it works that way, that I’m not deluding myself with an idea of what peacefulness should be.

Because from this vantage point, all I see are miles and miles to go before I sleep.

The days are darker, colder. And if I squint, I can see the New England winter in the distance, not quite bearing down on me, but marching inexorably closer. I cleaned out the shed today, sweeping out the detritus of the last few months and moving the snow shovels to the front. The snow is still a couple of months away, but something in the air makes it feel closer. Maybe it’s just how dark it is.

It could get me down. And on some days, it does. Most days it doesn’t though. While I could wish for more sun or maybe to be a little warmer sometimes, the truth is that there’s too much to love about the next few months not to feel anticipation as well. For instance, I love the fall and winter holidays. Halloween, Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Christmas. These are the holidays that bring light and warmth when people need it most. I think that, if I were to craft a perfect moment for me, it would probably involve relaxing around a glowing fireplace with my family, eating chocolate pecan pie with homemade whipped cream, and sipping hot cider with perhaps some butterscotch schnapps in it.

What do all of these have in common? They all require that it be cold out. I have no desire to drink hot cider in July. Even less would I enjoy crowding around a fire when it’s 90 degrees out. The fact is that I associate the most warm, comforting things in my life with cold weather. I mean, is there a better feeling in the world than snuggling inside a down comforter when it’s cold out? Fine, I can think of several better things too, but this one is right up there.

Also, for whatever reason, I’m incredibly food motivated. That includes drink. These upcoming months are totally the months of eating rich food. I love the spread of pies on Thanksgiving and the melting fondue of New Years.

I love drinking coffee on Christmas morning, champagne on New Years day, and hot cocoa with creme de menthe during snow storms.

I love how peaceful the world feels when it’s muffled by freshly fallen snow. I love snowshoeing. I love that moment when your phone beeps at 5:30 in the morning, and you just know that it’s a school cancellation. I love snow days!!! I love how excited my little girls are going to be to ride in a sled or follow animal tracks in the snow.

By March, I’ll be done with snow and cold. By the time spring is rolling in, I’ll want nothing more than to welcome it. I’ll get as excited as everyone else by the first crocuses, the first buds on our apples trees, the first warm day. There’s this moment each year, when you hear the spring peepers for the first time, that you know spring is really here. Soon I’ll be looking forward to that too. But not yet.

I wrote last time about closing up the garden at the end of the season. Once the first frost comes, I rip everything out, throw it all into the compost, and let in the chickens to clean out the weeds and bugs. It’s not very efficient. It just gives me the closure I look for emotionally before throwing myself into planning for next year.

Instead of seeking a clean break between this season and the next, what I really should do is plant a fall crop. Lots of the plants we grow in the spring are pretty cold hardy. That’s why we plant things like onions, lettuce, and spinach as soon as the soil is thawed enough to work. It’s not like we won’t see another frost, but they can take it. The same applies in the fall. Get them into the ground in late August/early September and they’ll have time to put on a little growth before the snows fly. They won’t really grow anymore once the temperature is below freezing, but they won’t necessarily die off either. You can pick at that kale and arugula all winter long. They may even start growing again in the spring, once it warms up a little, giving you a little heads start.

When we think about trying to grow a garden that sustains us throughout the year, those fall plantings are crucial. They extend the season both into the fall and earlier into the spring. Pretty cool, really, but not going to happen this year. Fortunately, there’s still Market Basket.

Extending the season, i.e. growing our own food for more of the year, is sort of an abstract goal. The difference between what we can grow and what we eat can be made up at the supermarket. If we do better next year, that’s great, but it doesn’t really matter. In fact, it won’t really matter until the unlikely situation arises where we can’t get our food from the supermarket. What happens between now and then is two things, practice and development of our garden infrastructure.

You can’t walk out into the lawn one day and pick a peach. You had to plant that peach years earlier. You had to nurture it, prune it, water it, weed it, etc. Annuals in the garden come with a shorter time horizon, but they still depend on the good soil you build up over time. Farmers used to let a field lie fallow so that it could recuperate the nutrients sucked out of the soil by whatever they were growing. Farmers now use mostly man made fertilizers for this purpose. Gardeners seeking a more sustainable practice replenish the nutrients in the soil by adding compost, rotating what they plant, and planting crops that add important elements back into the soil.

Now, having done all the hard work, a good gardener (read – one whose young children actually sleep through the night) wouldn’t leave bare earth in the beds. The winter rains and snows flow down through the soil, leaching out the nutrients, and carrying them away. In respect to the good soil I’m trying to build, I should plant some sort of winter cover crop. Time’s gotten away from me this season though. I think I’ll have to make do with a bed of oak leaves. I’ll rake them off again in the spring. Not as good as a cover crop, but good enough. They also have the added advantage of my not having to weed them in the spring.

In a better year though, a mix of winter wheat, winter rye, oats, and hairy vetch would be a good place to start. The rye quickly sends spreading roots into the soil, which helps to control erosion. The oats and wheat aren’t as cold tolerant. They’ll whither relatively early, but their remains shelter the soil, rather like a covering of leaves. They will break down over the winter/spring, and give back their own nutrients. Hairy vetch is a cold hardy legume. Legumes are great because they put Nitrogen back into the soil. Most cultivated crops suck a lot of nitrogen out of the soil, so legumes are good. Remember this when you plant your spring garden. Beans and peas make for excellent companion planting.

There are a thousand tasks and tricks to successful gardening that the folks who’ve come before us have developed and passed down. I make a lot of mistakes, but each year is practice. I take solace in the fact that there’s always next year.

The afternoons still have a hint of the summer warmth, but the nights are getting cold. We’re watching those last tomatoes on their vines, hoping just a couple more of them will ripen before the first frost strikes. It’s coming. Tonight? Next week? When it does, the vines will wilt and the tomatoes will take on that glassy look that means they’re only good for chicken food. It’s sad in its way, but it’s also a relief. It’s the relief of feeling that there’s nothing else you can do.

Which isn’t true, of course. My mother will be quick to tell me that I can take some of the more promising vines inside, that I can nurse them along to get just a few more of those precious homegrown tomatoes. She’s right, of course, but that’s not the point.

I want closure. I want to dig up the vines and throw them onto the compost. I want to let the chickens into the garden so they can root around in the soil, gleaning seeds and bugs and leaving their own fertilizer behind. I want to see the bare soil so I can put this season behind me and focus on the next. This probably stems from the same reasoning that has December as my favorite gardening season. It’s all about potential. Everything still feels possible then. It’s September now. We’ve had some successes and some failures this year, just like any year. However, it’s hard for reality to compete with the promise of next year. Next year, the Red Sox will win it all. Next year, my little girl will sleep through the night and I won’t be so darn tired. And next year, all the little seedlings we nurse through the spring will burst forth into an amazing, fruitful, weed free, deer free garden.